Your Mindset is a Zeitgeist
Our culture preaches mindset as a path to success. But do we really understand what that means and what it’s doing to us?
That question led me on a journey through cults, suicides, and Tony Robbins….
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Near the end of the 19th century, a quasi-religious phenomenon mashing Christian and Eastern spiritualism would begin to emerge and divide the medical community in America. The movement was documented by none other than the father of psychology himself, William James. Writing in The Varieites of Religious Experience (1902), James discussed the emergence of what he termed mind-cure therapies.
Mind-cure, as the name implies, was a movement that revolved around the mind and healing. Or as James wrote, mind-cure’s key theme was, “an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.”
If that sounds like a mouthful, rest assured, to James mind-cure was a little confusing too. As he wrote in 1898 to a friend on the emergence of this new movement:
“I am not fond and cannot understand a word of their jargon except their precept of assuming yourself well and claiming health rather than sickness which I am sure is magnificent.”
As time would prove, this precept of assuming ourselves well and healthy that James was speculating about over a century earlier has turned out to be quite a magnificent thing indeed. Today, countless studies and data support what was once mere assumption about the power of mind-cure therapies to the point that we’ve largely assimilated them in some form or another into our everyday behaviour and beliefs. Ideas of self-actualization, positive psychology and mindfulness have become so ubiquitous they transcend clinical therapy and religious experiences, oozing out of the fabric of pop culture, from yoga mats to online gurus to special-interest documentaries preaching us one thing above all: that the key to a healthy, successful life starts from within.
So, if it seems like a kind of mind-cure mentality is everywhere these days it’s because, well, it is. Except nowadays, I’d argue, we call it more simply, less clinically: mindset.
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Goolge’s Ngram Viewer is a cool tool that tracks the use of phrases in published books since 1800. A quick search of the word mind-cure shows that it peaked in literature somewhere in the first decade of the 20th century — shortly after James published Varieties — and then began declining quite significantly and steadily thereafter until the 1960s when it sputters momentarily back into our lexicon.
That mindset took off following the ’60s is no coincidence. You see, what happened around that time was an explosion of New Age thought and its offshoots like the Human Potential Movement (HPM). Much like its predecessor mind-cure, this new wave in the wellness movement emphasized reaching our potential through self-actualization, only in an ironic twist, shifting slightly away from a more clinical approach to a more spiritual and faith-based undertaking. In that way you could say, curing gave way to setting, which more benignly seems to imply setting a corrective course — much like a sailor lost at sea would using common sense and tools already at his disposal. It was truly only something that could have emerged in the ’60s counter-culture era, which was by that point quite saturated in the ever-growing influence of Eastern philosophies.
So as it passed, the mind-cure of yore became known as the mindset of nonce. And this is the mood we largely inhabit today. Or said otherwise, this is your zeitgeist.
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James concluded back in 1898 that overall the growing belief in the power of the mind was a positive thing. I’d like to preface the following paragraphs with that in mind. Overall, I think it would be hard for anyone today to argue otherwise. Again, there are enough peer-reviewed studies — placebo induced miracles, especially — to back up much of the foundations of cognitive behavioural therapies. This article is not about undermining that. Rather, it’s about calling out the myopia of our current mindset culture and recognizing how it may also be hurting us. In order to do that though, we have to first understand the history of where our current beliefs have come from and why it is we think the way we do today.
For me, this journey back through time takes on an even more personal note as it involves calling out a deeply ingrained bias that was more or less implanted in me from a young age, one that has greatly conditioned me to favour self-help beliefs. You see, my mother has been a practicing Scientologist for as long as I have been alive. And no, I am not a Scientologist. But talking about it with the public at large usually never seems to progress beyond questions of cults and aliens, which is both amusing and a shame because it’s a religion that remains largely misunderstood (like almost any other religion). Indeed, many would be surprised to learn that Scientology sits somewhere squarely in the New Age and Human Potential Movement culture, of which it is both a product and contributor. When L. Ron Hubbard published Dianetics in 1950 (before Scientology was ever Scientology and an official religion, mired in all things that religions tend to be mired in), he was preaching things that were closely echoed before and after by some of the most influential activators and thinkers of the 20th century from the likes of Martin Heidegger (Being and Time), Daniel Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People), Carl Rogers (co-founder of Humanistic Psychology), Michael Murphy (co-founder of the Esalen Institute), Werner Erhard (founder of the defunct EST and later Landmark trainings), and Reverend Dr Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) to name but a few. And to be clear, this is not something the Church of Scientology has fed me. It’s something I’ve dug up through lots of research and would argue that the Church would rather not be discussed for a variety of reasons. One being that we tend to discredit those we are most alike.
This is why though, it matters to you too. Because you can almost trace an incestuous link connecting all these thinkers. And sure, just like all good carnal links, this one has had more than its share of kinks and cranks as rifts and disagreements sometimes emerged among them. But while their practices and approaches have often varied as each have attempted to distinguish and articulate their beliefs, more oft than naught their differences have appeared to be merely matters of semantics. This shouldn’t come as any surprise. The present emerges not out of a tabula rasa — the result of some rogue genius creating out of thin air — but from a continuum of shifting conversations and norms that have themselves been shifting and evolving. That is to say: we are all stealing and building upon the groundwork laid for us by those before. What is interesting though, is how much this history, these links at the core of our current mindset culture have largely been forgotten or overlooked.
Take the case and point of one such person we are all likely to recognize: Tony Robbins. The men listed above all helped in some shape or form lay the foundation for Robbins’ teachings and workshops to be culturally accepted en masse, but there was one man in particular who Tony was a direct disciple of. That man was Werner Erhard. Today, the core of Erhard’s beliefs and even his slightly controversial approach to teaching them (for instance in the now-defunct Forum and EST sessions) are strikingly echoed in Robbins’ own personal work and seminars. And while their methods may be different from Robbin’s, those same beliefs are found with striking similarity in two of our other modern spiritual gurus: namely, Ekhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne. Indeed, when reading the works of each of these massively influential 21st century thinkers you get the sense while going from Unlimited Power (Tony Robbins) to The Power of Now (Ekhart Tolle) to The Secret (Rhonda Byrne) that, as Rutger Bregman says, you’re in “an endless merry-go-round of the same people saying the same things.”
But what’s maybe even more astonishing though, is that this merry-go-round even has a geo-physical location. Namely, the Pacific West Coast. This is the literal Point Zero of our incestuous link.
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In his book Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us, journalist Will Storr does a brilliant job of tracking some of the threads of our current culture, going all the way back to Ancient Greece. From those foundational roots of Aristotle and the ideal image of man, Storr leads us up through to the present day… and all the way to the West Coast of USA. You see, it turns out that the Pacific Northwest has served as a sort of hot-pot for mindset culture to explode. Many of the thinkers listed above themselves migrated to this coast in search of their own journeys and spiritual awakenings, connecting and solidifying their teachings from there. Ekhart Tolle, Carl Rogers, Michael Murphy, and Werner Erhard, for instance, each had foundations that put them somewhere along the rugged coast between Vancouver and LA.
“Basically,” Storr writes on the geophysical location of our modern zeitgeist, “the further west you go, the more individualistic, the more delusional about choice, the more emphasis on self-esteem, the more the emphasis on self-just-about-everything, until it falls in the Pacific.”
Well, here we are: at the precipice of the Pacific, except now its pull has been mirrored and echoed nearly everywhere else. Indeed, it seems that this mindset zeitgeist permeates the world over.
So what? You might ask. Well, it might sound trivial to say it aloud, but it bears repeating: we need to acknowledge these links in order to understand that our beliefs are not something that we are necessarily intuitively born with, but are as much (if not more) cultured into as a result of a long shift of earlier movements and trends. That’s point number one. But then that takes us to point number two, which is that: we need to understand at which point these beliefs have limits and are growing, almost cult-like themselves, into empty gibberish repeated to us ad nauseam. Indeed, what does it really mean when we tell each other writ large that our mindset controls the kind of life we live?
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Although James approached mind-cure therapies all those years ago when writing in Varities with a fairly nuanced view of their power and limitations, today this nuanced perspective seems largely missing in our near robotic echoes of mindset doctrine. Most alarmingly, it sweeps right over what was actually first identified by James himself as mind-cure’s biggest weakness: That there are limits to mind-healing when it comes to some basic realities about human life, in particular when it comes to melancholy, tragedy, and depression. This was a skepticism that James would actually come to understand on a personal level later in his life when he ended up suffering heart damage that left him afflicted until his death in 1910. The condition kept him in what he called a “cold, pinched, quaking” state that made him see wellness in a new light. Upon reflection he concluded, “I am turned into a pent-in egotist, beyond a doubt, have in my spiritual make-up no rescuing resources adapted to such a situation.”
Meaning, here was an affliction that mind-cure couldn’t resolve; Limits to the religion of healthy-mindedness that indicated to James that for those suffering, it did not always offer adequate recourse. It was an astute observation. One that has since become evidenced in history. Although it’s not something that we’re so open to admitting or acknowledging anymore, that there are limits to the power of our minds and beliefs. You’re deemed a heretic or worse, negative if you do. But I think it’s worth being negative for a brief moment in order to dig into this phenomenon because there’s this curious thing about suicides that kept popping up in my research.
There were, for instance, the suicides that came out of the Esalen Institute, Michael Murphy and Richard Price’s 1970s brainchild in avant-garde self-transformation therapies. The curious suicides of practitioners played a large role in turning public opinion away from the Institute and its practices. Suicide has also been an issue of contention in the Church of Scientology. As documented in Leah Remini’s award-winning docu-series Scientology and the Aftermath, the Church has been accused of not properly addressing suicidal behaviour among its members. But even beyond the very new-age institutions that boomed in the latter half of the 20th century with the aim of healing us via our minds, the question of suicide has become somewhat of concern more generally in our culture at large today. This is no truer than in Silicon Valley where — despite being the metaphorical apogee of Western civilization and the cultural epicenter of mindset culture — the Valley has seen teen suicide rates explode and rise steadily since the turn of the century. Among high school students in Palo Alto, for instance, the tech center of the world, suicide rates are four times higher than the national average. It’s ironic. And yet also disturbing that the culturally coveted West Coast vibes aren’t soothing its individuals.
Of course, the issue goes beyond the precipice of the Pacific though. As mentioned, depression has become a broader trend of sorts. More people are on antidepressants than ever before and suicide rates in the US are as high as they’ve been in nearly thirty decades. Which of course, begs the question: Why are so many of us so unhappy? And if it were simply a matter of conscious mind-setting, how come happiness still seems so elusive for so many of us even though we’ve gotten the memo long ago about rewriting our destiny through our synapses?
It almost goes without saying: it would be terribly myopic to pinpoint the suicide issue solely on our mindset culture. It’s definitely not that simple nor clear cut. But the numbers are there: something is happening to our minds. They are slowly rotting. And there’s something mindset culture isn’t fixing by telling us to fix ourselves. Part of the issue, I suspect, has to do with the pressure this very culture puts on the individual self to be all-healing, all-wise while negating other contributing factors in our disquiet.
In his book Lost Connections, Johann Hari addresses this point with beautiful nuance. He writes about the three factors that have largely been recognized in affecting depression. They are: biological, psychological, and social. Meaning, the way our bodies are hard-wired, the way we think about the world, and the external interactions in which we engage in all have a role to play in contributing to our mental health.
Mindset culture, of course, places emphasis on the psychological reasons; The internal stuff we are conscious and in control of. Which doesn’t make it wrong. But when mindset culture overshadows the other contributing and causal factors that make up our well being it starts to put a kind of pressure on us that we are finding increasingly hard to live up to.
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“To be healed of all that ailed them, all they had to do was believe,” Will Storr writes about the basis of Christian salvation. In a way, it’s a sentiment that rings just as true today. But we’ve taken it far beyond body-healing. Belief healing nowadays is intricately linked to success on all accounts, from our business to relationships to financial success to school and grades. It’s a belief blindly repeated by our peers and leaders. Want a better business, or make more money in your life? We’re lured by countless gurus and coaches and teachers. Easy! Just switch a few neural pathways in your brain and, voila! So it shall be. Because after all, energy goes where energy flows.
In this regard, there’s something about the way that mindset has almost literally come to mean success in our culture — though success defined not as something of a spiritual quality, but as a metric valued in terms of scores or followers or dollars — that feels deeply perverted. Our culture tells us that if we want to succeed, we need to look inwards and believe. It’s a motto that reads like the quintessential American Dream. It’s beautiful. But as Storr argues, it’s also a motto that “radically over-estimate[s] our powers of control.” Water, as a friend once explained it to me, still boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level, whether you may wish it to be or not.
Let me be clear once again: In no way am I saying that depression and anxiety are solely a result of the mindset culture we live in. And yet — and yet — I cannot help but sense that our belief that you can be anyone, do anything, overcome all if only you put your mind to it has prevented us from having open and honest discussions about trickier barriers to success and larger systemic issues that impact our well-being. But I think Christopher Ryan said it better in his book Civilized to Death:
“The clear implication is that any discontent or despair you may be experiencing must be due to some fault of your own — certainly not to the civilization you were born into. You aren’t working hard enough, consuming the right products, taking the right supplements, following the right exercise regimen, driving the right car, or drinking enough water.”
This mindset myth is what Storr has called our ‘the cultural lie’, which “says we can do anything we set our minds to, that we can be whoever we want to be… . It means that the men and women who lose simply didn’t want it badly enough, that they just didn’t believe.”
And there’s that word again: belief. It’s a tricky one because as the history shows it’s almost most certainly a story we’ve gotten addicted to telling ourselves. It’s not necessarily a story we need to ditch though. Again, I’m not advocating we turn against mindset culture. Far from it. Like James, I get it, I believe it, and I see deep value in it. But, also like James, I think we need to have a slightly healthier relationship with the Divine Mind. To understand that the jargon we throw around at each other — the mindfulness we strive for, the self-actualization we dream of — these are words that easily numb us to a wider context at play in our lives. Words that, ultimately, aren’t quite the whole truth and are just as likely cheap, feel-good bromides. Indeed, there’s a certain misleading implication to our current mindset hoo-ra that isn’t just widely oversimplified, but also potentially incredibly misguided. Here we are presupposing mindset as a cureall and sure path to success — as if success in this day and age were ipso facto a positive thing. I think the jury’s still out on that one given that a growing portion of us seem to be stuck in a “cold, pinched, quaking” state as James felt all those years ago. An indication, perhaps, that the goals we’re striving for are simply masquerading as metrics for success, metrics that turn out to be rather insufficient in bringing any kind of meaningful value to our lives.
So, the next time someone advises you to change your mindset in order to become your best self or grow a business or find everlasting love, please consider the following: you can change and reprogram your brain all day (almost) to believe and follow and compel you towards certain goals. Indeed, the brain is a highly malleable piece of wizardry. And in a lot of cases, it will work wonders. But just beware when you fail or stumble (as we all will at some point). Consider that, maybe the zeitgeist has been telling us a story that leaves us terribly maladapted to cope.
